The Search Agency's State of Paid Search Report Q4 2012

The Search Agency’s State of Paid Search Report summarizes current paid search marketing trends across search engines, devices, and industries.

To uncover key trends of Q4 2012, the agency extracted client data from search engine advertising tools. The sample included advertisers who had fifteen consecutive months of data with The Search Agency and an established and stable business model from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012. All results are based on U.S. campaigns only. Our findings and forecasts are based on year-over-year (YoY) and quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) analyses on aggregated client data that includes:

•  Search engine advertising continues to show healthy growth with increased spending, impressions and total clicks YoY 
• Q4 2012 marked the first time that share of spend on tablets exceeded spend on smartphones 
• Q4 2012 was defined by tablet consumer adoption and usage--tablet click share increased by 16% QoQ and more than doubled YoY
• Product Listing Ads (PLAs) continued their strong growth in Q4 2012 and accounted for 13.6% of total Google spending for advertisers running PLA campaigns